You can play casual games, like checkers or pool. You can also share in adult activities, like watching porn together.

VB PlayDates is powered by a partner company called StripVille. We’ve worked to integrate our billing systems (just like with the existing VBCams site), so you don’t have to enter your credit card again.

Why did you create this site?

Adult social interaction is a growing space. You get a powerful thrill chatting with a real girl that non-interactive videos just can’t deliver.

But we didn’t want to just create another cam site. We wanted to create something new.

On most cam sites, you’re talking to girls in Eastern Europe or the Philippines, so language differences limit your interaction. Also, it’s unnatural to jump into a conversation with someone you’ve never met.

With VB PlayDates, most of the girls are American, and you can just play games with them, and allow a rapport to build organically.

That’s the idea, but it’s totally new and we’d love feedback.

What kind of feedback do you want?

At a basic level, what do you think of the site? Are you running into bugs? Usability issues? Did you like watching porn with the girls? How about the games?

At a deeper level, what do you think of the concept? What kind of adult social interaction would interest you?

I’d like to share some numbers, thoughts, and next steps that have emerged since launching VB3 last week.

Numbers

Conversion Rate

VB3 has improved our conversion rate of visitors to members by over 30%, and our cancellations have held steady. This is a dramatic improvement.

Before the launch of VB3, we were shrinking. Now, we are growing again.

Site Usage

Roughly 15% of our customers continue to use VB2 (i.e., they explicitly click “back to old site”).

Thoughts

We Have a Passionate Community

I started this company in 2002, and I’ve always strived to treat customers as I wanted to be treated. My goal was to create the world’s best site, one that people were happy to join.

When we launched VB3, we received a lot of negative feedback. I took this feedback – much of it from our most loyal customers – very personally.

There was a lot of internal debate on how to interpret all the messages we were receiving from our members. On one hand, we were getting more negative than positive feedback. On the other, the total number of people who complained was less than 1% of our members.

You Can’t Please Everyone

We have tens of thousands of members, and their tastes vary. There were also internal team dynamics and interests of content partners to consider.

What we ended up doing was spending the last few months ironing out the quirks in VB3, and making the site work more like VB2. The new site works pretty much like the old one. We considered doing a comprehensive redesign, but no one wanted to go through another 6-12 months of development time.

Next Steps

Continue to Improve VB3

Now that we’re past the painful hurdle of launching the new site, we’re going to keep improving it. In two weeks, you should see:

Big changes to how search works.

Fixes to the stash, such as the ability to add and remove items easily.

Various performance improvements.

And looking beyond the next two weeks, expect to see a mobile / iPad optimized site.

Keep VB2 Around

We will continue to maintain VB2 for a while, at least until usage drops to single digit percentages.